Amelia Schafer
ICT
The Trump administration’s proposed freeze on federal grants would cut $24.5 billion in funding to Native communities for health, law enforcement, education and key social services, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.
The cuts, if they gain approval through the courts, would violate treaty obligations to tribal nations and impact nearly every tribe across the United States, particularly in Oklahoma, the Western Plains, the Southwest, the West Coast and Alaska, according to the analysis.
The funding freeze would impact Native people both on and off reservations, the report notes.
“It’s going to have real on-the-ground effects for people, tribal governments, for the ability for Native people who have real needs to get the services that they’re frankly entitled to because of this longstanding trust and treaty obligation,” said Robert Maxim, Mashpee Wampanoag, a Brookings Metro Fellow who co-authored the report.
“It would be destructive for tribal self-governance,” he said. “This is really the lifeblood of how tribes operate fiscally, but so many tribes are limited in their ability to get revenue.”
The report found that since 2018, the federal government has obligated funding to more than 1,700 tribal governments, Native nonprofits and Native-owned businesses involving more than 750 programs.
The federal government has obligated nearly $93 billion in funds since 2018 through grants and cooperative agreements, but Brookings found that $24.5 billion remains unpaid for more than 700 programs. Those funds would be temporarily or permanently inaccessible if the order from the federal Office of Management and Budget, known as OMB, is allowed to go into effect.
“Nearly all Tribes would be affected by a federal grant freeze, with many facing the prospect of losing tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars — funding that is critical for supporting some of the most historically underserved communities in the United States,” the report concluded.
“When the federal government withholds funding from Tribes and Native American people, it’s not just a policy change. It’s a violation of those commitments — putting essential services at risk and undermining Tribal governing capacity.”
A federal appeals court will decide if the administration has the legal authority to mass-suspend the grants, with arguments set in coming months in a lawsuit filed by the state of New York against President Donald Trump and his top administrators.
“As litigation around OMB’s funding freeze continues, it is essential that federal decisionmakers recognize the unique basis of funding for Tribes and Native American people,” the report states. “Funding to Indian Country is rooted in longstanding, legally-binding agreements between the United States and sovereign Tribal nations — not race, climate, or DEI.”
At the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, the OMB issued a sweeping order announcing a halt to federal grants nationwide, throwing tribal programs into turmoil.
Although the grant freeze was temporarily halted, the administration continues to push for its implementation, and tribes continue to report difficulties in accessing the already-approved funds, the report notes.
The bulk of the at-risk funding is dispersed through programs such as the Department of Health and Human Services, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education under the Department of the Interior, the Department of Commerce and the Environmental Protection Agency.
If the funding freeze clears legal hurdles, critical projects across the country will be at risk, the Brookings report said. These projects include a $35 million grant to the Oglala Sioux Tribe for broadband development, a $3 million grant to urban Native health board for community health worker training, and a $200,000 grant to the Chickahominy Indian Tribe for preliminary engineering and environmental work towards a childcare center.
“This is the building block of how the U.S. government pays back tribes for the land it took,” Maxim said.
The report does not include the sweeping cuts approved under Trump’s so-called “big beautiful bill” by Congress, which includes cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other social programs that include Native people as well as others, Brookings officials said.
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization based in Washington, D.C. Maxim co-authored the report with Glencora Haskins, research associate and applied research manager.
CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to note that it is $93 billion that the federal government has obligated to Native communities.
